How to Build Your Own Network-Attached Storage System

How to Build Your Own Network-Attached Storage SystemBuilding your own NAS is a great way to safeguard and share your data, without breaking the bank. We'll show you how to get started.

By Nate Ralph, PCWorld Oct 17, 2011 3:00 am

With cheap storage readily available, the temptation to build vast libraries of music, movies, photos, and documents is ever present. But when each PC in your home is packed to its aluminum gills with gigabytes upon gigabytes of digital goods, managing all of that data can be a hassle.

Network-attached storage can make wrangling data much easier. Imagine a single machine on your network slinging files to every PC in your home, managing backups, and safeguarding all of your important memories or sensitive data.

Plenty of network-attached storage appliances on the market are ready and able to tackle your storage needs, but buying one can be an expensive option--particularly if you have only a few files that you want to share with a few machines. Things get even more problematic for those users who have terabytes upon terabytes of data: You can expect to pay dearly for a NAS that?s equipped to handle your digital hoard.

Fortunately, building your own NAS is simple. And doing so offers a lot of advantages over forking over your hard-earned cash--build your own, and you can dictate its size, feature set, and storage capacity, and change things on a whim.